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How Does One Vote Make a Difference? Why Should You Vote in the Upcoming Elections?

Unlocking the power of one: your vote, your voice, your future.

Wednesday April 17, 2024 , 4 min Read

Ever wondered if your single vote can rock the mammoth machinery of elections? It's a common query, especially in a vibrant democracy like India, where millions cast their votes. But here's the catch – every vote is a building block in the grand structure of democracy. Let’s unpack why your vote is not just a right, but a powerhouse of change, steering the course of governance.

The Ripple Effect of a Single Vote

Imagine a pebble thrown into a still pond. It creates ripples that spread far beyond the initial splash. Similarly, one vote might seem insignificant in the grand scheme, but it has the power to influence outcomes in surprisingly significant ways. For instance, consider the 2016 U.S. Presidential election where a mere 77 votes in each precinct in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin would have changed the winning candidate. Closer home, there have been numerous local body elections in India where a single vote has decided the fate of candidates. This proves that every vote can be a tide-turner.

A Closer Look at the Numbers: Why Your Vote Matters

Data from various elections across the globe shows a troubling trend of low voter turnout among youth. This demographic, full of potential to drive change, often remains underrepresented. Why should this concern you? Because it's not just about who wins or loses, but about making sure every voice is heard. In the 2019 Indian General Elections, voter turnout was about 67%, which means a third of the electorate did not participate. Each of these non-votes could have dramatically shifted the policy direction of the country.

The Butterfly Effect in Elections

The concept of "the butterfly effect" in chaos theory suggests that small causes can have large effects. Translate this to elections, and your single vote can be the butterfly, whose wings might just be powerful enough to affect the political winds. By voting, you help in shaping policies that affect everything from the roads you travel to the quality of the air you breathe.

Voting is your direct line to the corridors of power. It’s how you hold leaders accountable and voice your opinion on how your society should work. Not voting is passing on this powerful tool to others, who then make decisions on your behalf. Want educational reforms, better healthcare, or more robust public safety measures? Vote for it!

Stories That Inspire: When Voting Made Real Change

Take the story of a small town in India, where residents voted overwhelmingly for cleaner streets and better local governance. Within a year, the town saw improved waste management services and a new public park, hence proof that voting with intention can lead to tangible improvements.

How to Vote in the Upcoming Elections: A Simple Guide

1. Register to Vote: Check your eligibility and register. In India, you can easily register online through the National Voters' Service Portal .

2. Learn About the Candidates and Issues: Information is power. Read up on the candidates’ platforms and the issues at stake.

3. Plan Your Vote: Decide whether you’ll vote in person or opt for postal voting if available. Mark your calendar!

4. Cast Your Vote!: On election day, go out and make your voice heard.

Let’s Not Skip the Ballot Ballet!

Elections are the dance of democracy, and every voter is a dancer. Don’t sit this one out; let’s make every move count! Remember, when you vote, you’re not just ticking a box; you're tuning the future melody of governance.

Voting isn't just a civic duty; it’s a powerful catalyst for change. Your single vote does matter, much more than you might think. As the upcoming elections approach, remember that this is your chance to influence how your community, state, and country are run. It’s simple, it’s effective, and yes, it’s crucial. Get out there and vote, because when you do, you ensure that the future is not something that just happens to you, but something you actively shape.

Edited by Rahul Bansal

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Why Every Vote Matters — The Elections Decided By A Single Vote (Or A Little More)

Domenico Montanaro

A woman votes Tuesday in Cambridge, Ohio. More than a dozen races were decided by a single vote or ended in a tie over the last 20 years. Justin Merriman/Getty Images hide caption

A woman votes Tuesday in Cambridge, Ohio. More than a dozen races were decided by a single vote or ended in a tie over the last 20 years.

Updated at 4:15 p.m. ET on Nov. 10

Kevin Entze, a police officer from Washington state, knows it all could have been different.

Entze lost a GOP primary in a state House race by one vote out of more than 11,700 cast. And then he found out that one of his fellow reserve officers forgot to mail in his ballot.

"He left his ballot on his kitchen counter, and it never got sent out," Entze told Seattle Post-Intelligencer .

Voter Turnout Could Hit 50-Year Record For Midterm Elections

That was 16 years ago, but it is stories like that that highlight just how much every vote can matter. It's a lesson that voters in Florida were being reminded of on Saturday, with the news that the state's elections for governor and U.S. Senate were heading for recounts .

Despite Tuesday's massive turnout in the midterm election, voting in midterm races is traditionally low. The midterm elections in 2014, for example, saw the lowest voter participation in more than 70 years.

Back in 1942, many American voters had a good reason not to vote — they were fighting in World War II.

Today, many Americans feel disaffected and disconnected from the system.

On The Sidelines Of Democracy

On the sidelines of democracy: exploring why so many americans don't vote.

"I feel like my voice doesn't matter," Megan Davis, 31, of East Providence, R.I., told NPR . "People who suck still are in office, so it doesn't make a difference."

But a single vote can make a big difference. In fact, there have been more than a dozen races decided by a single vote or ending in a tie over the last 20 years.

Here's a look back at some of those and some more of the closest races in U.S. history:

2018: The Democratic primary for Baltimore County executive in July was decided by just 17 votes .

Virginia Republican David Yancey Wins Tie-Breaking Drawing

2017: A Virginia House of Delegates race ended in a tie out of more than 23,000 votes cast. The tie was broken by pulling a name, placed in a film canister, out of a bowl. Republican David Yancey was declared the winner . The result was heightened by the fact that the win gave Republicans control of the state House by a single seat.

2016: A Vermont state Senate Democratic primary was determined by a single vote out of more than 7,400 cast.

2016: A Vermont state House seat was determined by one vote out of 2,000. Here's what's really crazy: This was a rematch, and when they first faced each other in 2010, the race was also decided by one vote — in the other direction.

2016: A New Mexico state House seat was decided by two votes out of almost 14,000.

Democratic Women House Candidates Set For A Much Easier Election Day Than GOP Women

2016: The margin on Election Day for a GOP primary for the U.S. House for the 5th Congressional seat from Arizona was just 16 votes, but it widened to 27 after a recount.

2016: A Wyoming state House GOP primary was decided by just one vote , 583 to 582.

In Governors' Elections This Year, Republicans Have A Lot To Lose

2010: A state House race in Massachusetts ended in a tie, and the courts ordered a do-over. In the rerun, Republican Peter Durant wound up winning by just 56 votes out of about 8,000 cast.

2010: A state House race in Vermont was determined by one vote; another had a one-difference vote on Election Day, but was later widened to two).

2008: In the U.S. Senate race, Democrat Al Franken defeated Republican Norm Coleman by just 312 votes out of almost 2.9 million votes cast. Franken's win gave Democrats a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate .

Residents in the traditional Republican stronghold of Orange County, Calif., got to make their voice heard last week at an Early Vote Center in Huntington Beach, Calif. Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Residents in the traditional Republican stronghold of Orange County, Calif., got to make their voice heard last week at an Early Vote Center in Huntington Beach, Calif.

2008: An Alaska state House race was won by four votes out of 10,000.

2006: A Democratic primary for an Alaska state House seat was decided by a coin toss to break a tie. The winner, Bryce Edgmon, is currently speaker of the Alaska House.

In Final Stretch, Groups Work To Get Young People, Minorities To The Polls

2004: A special election in Radford, Va., for commonwealth's attorney was decided by one vote .

2002: A tie for a county commissioner seat in Nevada was determined by drawing the highest card. Amazingly, both candidates drew a jack, but the Democrat drew a jack of spades, which beat out the Republican's jack of diamonds.

2002: A GOP state House primary in Washington state was determined by one vote out of more than 11,000 cast. The person who lost had to wonder what might have been when one of his fellow police officers confided that he forgot to mail in his ballot. "He left his ballot on his kitchen counter and it never got sent out," he said .

Here's Why Democrats Are Confident They'll Win The House

2002: A Connecticut state House seat was determined by one vote out of more than 6,400 cast.

1998: A Massachusetts state House GOP primary race ended in a tie after more than 1,700 ballots were cast. The winner was determined by a judge.

1996: South Dakota Democrat John McIntyre led Republican Hal Wick by just four votes out of almost 8,400 for a state legislative seat. A subsequent recount showed Wick the winner — by just one vote, 4,192 to 4,191. But the state Supreme Court ruled that one ballot for Wick was invalid because of an overvote, resulting in a tie . Wick eventually won, because the tie was broken by the state legislature, which went for Wick, 46-20.

GOP Closing Arguments For 2018: 4 Ways To Handle Trump

1994 : A Wyoming state House seat ended in a 1,941-to-1,941 tie on Election Day. The tie was broken, live on NBC's Today show , with the secretary of state pulling a pingpong ball with the winning candidate's name on it out of the governor's hat. The winner went on to become speaker of the state House.

1991: A Virginia state House seat was determined by one vote out of almost 13,000 cast .

Supporters of Democratic candidate for Florida governor Mayor Andrew Gillum cheer during early voting events throughout South Florida as part of the "Bring It Home: Bus Tour" in Miami on Thursday. Michele Eve Sandberg/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Supporters of Democratic candidate for Florida governor Mayor Andrew Gillum cheer during early voting events throughout South Florida as part of the "Bring It Home: Bus Tour" in Miami on Thursday.

In the 19th century, there were even a few U.S. House races that were determined by a single vote:

Trump Escalates Immigration Issue Days Ahead Of Elections With White House Remarks

1882: VA-1: Robert M. Mayo defeated Democrat George T. Garrison, 10,505 to 10,504.

1854: IL-7: Democrat James C. Allen beat Republican William B. Archer, 8,452 to 8,451.

1847: IN-6: Whig candidate George G. Dunn defeated Democratic candidate David M. Dobson, 7,455 to 7,454.

This Maine District Went For Obama, Then Trump. Now It's A Toss-Up

1847: VA-3: Whig Thomas S.Flournoy won 650 to 649

1829: KY-2: Jackson Democrat Nicholas Coleman defeated National Republican Adam Beatty, 2,520 to 2,519.

Of course, none of those is to mention the 537-vote margin that George W. Bush won Florida by in the 2000 presidential election — out of almost 6 million votes cast — or Donald Trump winning the presidency despite losing the popular vote by almost 3 million votes — all because he eked out just enough — 70,000 votes out of 12 million in three states — to win the Electoral College.

Devin Nunes' Re-Election Tests Whether All Politics Are Now National

Why Voting Is Important

“Voting is your civic duty.” This is a pretty common sentiment, especially each November as Election Day approaches. But what does it really mean? And what does it mean for Americans in particular?

Social Studies, Civics, U.S. History

Americans Voting

Typically in the United States, national elections draw large numbers of voters compared to local elections.

Hill Street Studios

A History of Voting in the United States Today, most American citizens over the age of 18 are entitled to vote in federal and state elections , but voting was not always a default right for all Americans. The United States Constitution, as originally written, did not define specifically who could or could not vote—but it did establish how the new country would vote. Article 1 of the Constitution determined that members of the Senate and House of Representatives would both be elected directly by popular vote . The president, however, would be elected not by direct vote, but rather by the Electoral College . The Electoral College assigns a number of representative votes per state, typically based on the state’s population. This indirect election method was seen as a balance between the popular vote and using a state’s representatives in Congress to elect a president. Because the Constitution did not specifically say who could vote, this question was largely left to the states into the 1800s. In most cases, landowning white men were eligible to vote, while white women, black people, and other disadvantaged groups of the time were excluded from voting (known as disenfranchisement ).

While no longer explicitly excluded, voter suppression is a problem in many parts of the country. Some politicians try to win re election by making it harder for certain populations and demographics to vote. These politicians may use strategies such as reducing polling locations in predominantly African American or Lantinx neighborhoods, or only having polling stations open during business hours, when many disenfranchised populations are working and unable to take time off. It was not until the 15th Amendment was passed in 1869 that black men were allowed to vote. But even so, many would-be voters faced artificial hurdles like poll taxes , literacy tests, and other measures meant to discourage them from exercising their voting right. This would continue until the 24th Amendment in 1964, which eliminated the poll tax , and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended Jim Crow laws. Women were denied the right to vote until 1920, when the long efforts of the women’s suffrage movement resulted in the 19th Amendment. With these amendments removing the previous barriers to voting (particularly sex and race), theoretically all American citizens over the age of 21 could vote by the mid 1960s. Later, in 1971, the American voting age was lowered to 18, building on the idea that if a person was old enough to serve their country in the military, they should be allowed to vote. With these constitutional amendments and legislation like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the struggle for widespread voting rights evolved from the Founding Fathers’ era to the late 20th century. Why Your Vote Matters If you ever think that just one vote in a sea of millions cannot make much of a difference, consider some of the closest elections in U.S. history. In 2000, Al Gore narrowly lost the Electoral College vote to George W. Bush. The election came down to a recount in Florida, where Bush had won the popular vote by such a small margin that it triggered an automatic recount and a Supreme Court case ( Bush v. Gore ). In the end, Bush won Florida by 0.009 percent of the votes cast in the state, or 537 votes. Had 600 more pro-Gore voters gone to the polls in Florida that November, there may have been an entirely different president from 2000–2008. More recently, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 by securing a close Electoral College win. Although the election did not come down to a handful of votes in one state, Trump’s votes in the Electoral College decided a tight race. Clinton had won the national popular vote by nearly three million votes, but the concentration of Trump voters in key districts in “swing” states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan helped seal enough electoral votes to win the presidency. Your vote may not directly elect the president, but if your vote joins enough others in your voting district or county, your vote undoubtedly matters when it comes to electoral results. Most states have a “winner take all” system where the popular vote winner gets the state’s electoral votes. There are also local and state elections to consider. While presidential or other national elections usually get a significant voter turnout, local elections are typically decided by a much smaller group of voters. A Portland State University study found that fewer than 15 percent of eligible voters were turning out to vote for mayors, council members, and other local offices. Low turnout means that important local issues are determined by a limited group of voters, making a single vote even more statistically meaningful. How You Can Make Your Voice Heard If you are not yet 18, or are not a U.S. citizen, you can still participate in the election process. You may not be able to walk into a voting booth, but there are things you can do to get involved:

• Be informed! Read up on political issues (both local and national) and figure out where you stand.
• Get out and talk to people. Even if you cannot vote, you can still voice opinions on social media, in your school or local newspaper, or other public forums. You never know who might be listening.
• Volunteer. If you support a particular candidate, you can work on their campaign by participating in phone banks, doing door-to-door outreach, writing postcards, or volunteering at campaign headquarters. Your work can help get candidates elected, even if you are not able to vote yourself.

Participating in elections is one of the key freedoms of American life. Many people in countries around the world do not have the same freedom, nor did many Americans in centuries past. No matter what you believe or whom you support, it is important to exercise your rights.

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Voting is a right often taken for granted in the US. Americans vote in much lower numbers compared to other developed countries, and American youth have one of the lowest voter turnouts in the world. 

Marginalized groups — from women to Black people — haven’t always had the right to vote, and laws still try to silence their voices. Not all governments exercise democracy, either. Citizens around the world don’t always have the freedom to appoint their leaders.

Participating in local and federal elections is one way for people to support policies that serve their communities’ needs and ensure they have a say in the decisions that benefit society.

Ahead of the next US election, here are seven facts to get excited about your role in the electoral process.

Nicole Hensel, left, and Raegan Cotton of New Era Colorado work to register college students to vote and answer their voting logistics questions during the pandemic at Auraria Campus in Denver, Colorado on Sept. 22, 2020. Nicole Hensel, left, and Raegan Cotton of New Era Colorado work to register college students to vote and answer their voting logistics questions during the pandemic at Auraria Campus in Denver, Colorado on Sept. 22, 2020. Image: Hyoung Chang/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post/Getty Images

1. Young people play an important role in elections.

Research suggests that if young people voted as much as older citizens, elected officials would be more likely to prioritize the policy issues that are important to them. Young people make up more than one-third of eligible voters , which means they hold a lot of power if they exercise their right to go to the polls. Generation Z, people between the ages of 18 and 23, are also  more ethnically and racially diverse than previous generations.

While young people are historically the group least likely to vote for several reasons , either because they lack encouragement and information, or they think they won’t make a difference and find the process too complicated, that's starting to change. 

Tufts University's Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) estimated that 31% of eligible people ages 18 to 29 voted in the 2018 midterms — a record turnout at the time. What’s more, almost twice as many millennials voted in 2018 compared to 2014.

In the 2020 presidential election, half of all eligible youth voted in 2020 — an 11-point increase from 2016 , according to CIRCLE.

2. A single vote can make or break an election.

Over the past two decades, more than  a dozen races were decided by a single vote or ended in a tie. If enough people vote in your district or county, your ballot can increase your preferred candidate’s chances of winning an election and help get policies passed that reflect your values and your community’s needs. 

3. Taking time off isn’t always realistic, but more companies are giving employees flexibility to exercise their civic duty.

In the 2014 midterm elections, 35% of people didn’t vote because of a scheduling conflict. Voting can take as short as 10 minutes or as long as several hours, but in almost half of the country, employees are entitled to take time off to vote. Companies in over 22 states are required to provide paid time off to vote, and in August 2020, several high profile companies announced they’ll offer more flexibility on Election Day.

4. Registering to vote is a big step into adulthood and it’s possible to sign up before 18. 

Voting is considered a rite of passage when adolescents turn 18, but many states actually allow registration earlier. Residents in some states can preregister to vote as young as 16 to ensure they are already registered by their 18th birthdays. Select states also let 17-year-olds participate in primary elections.

5. Voting doesn’t have to be inconvenient — many citizens can now vote by mail.

In many states, voting in the 2020 presidential election was as simple as dropping off an envelope at the post office. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, states across the country modified their absentee and mail-in  protocols . Meanwhile, five states mandated that everyone vote by mail in the election to avoid the virus’ spread.

6. Democracy can’t function without full participation, and early voting improves turnout.

The rules vary state by state , but when residents have the option to vote early, they can head to the polls at a time that’s convenient for them and avoid lines. South Dakota and Minnesota open up early in-person voting with an absentee ballot as early as 46 days before the general election.

7. Registration complications keep people away from the polls, but signing up online can help guarantee citizens can cast a ballot.

In 2018, college students in Fairfax County, Virginia, who participated in a study reported that they didn’t mail in their absentee ballots because they didn’t know where to buy stamps. Voters who want to avoid any snail mail mishaps and live in any of these 39 states have the option of registering online. Online registration not only minimizes administration costs and data entry errors, but it also improves state voter list accuracy.  

Global Citizen and HeadCount have teamed up to engage young Americans to check their voting status, register, and vote. Through the work of this groundbreaking nonpartisan collaboration, we’re activating young people to get involved and spark change in their communities by expressing opinions at the ballot box. Learn how to register to vote , volunteer , and take action right now!

Editor's note : This story was updated on April 25, 2022.

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Why Every Vote Matters — The Elections Decided By A Single Vote (Or A Little More)

Kevin Entze, a police officer from Washington state, knows it all could have been different.

Entze lost a GOP primary in a state House race by one vote out of more than 11,700 cast. And then he found out that one of his fellow reserve officers forgot to mail in his ballot.

"He left his ballot on his kitchen counter, and it never got sent out," Entze told Seattle Post-Intelligencer .

That was 16 years ago, but it is stories like that that highlight just how much every vote can matter. And yet the last midterm elections in 2014 saw the lowest voter participation in more than 70 years. Back in 1942, many American voters had a good reason not to vote — they were fighting in World War II.

Back then, many American voters had a good reason not to vote — they were fighting in World War II.

Today, many Americans feel disaffected and disconnected from the system.

"I feel like my voice doesn't matter," Megan Davis, 31, of East Providence, R.I., told NPR . "People who suck still are in office, so it doesn't make a difference."

But a single vote can make a big difference. In fact, there have been more than a dozen races decided by a single vote or ending in a tie over the last 20 years.

Here's a look back at some of those and some more of the closest races in U.S. history:

2018: The Democratic primary for Baltimore County executive in July was decided by just 17 votes .

2017: A Virginia House of Delegates race ended in a tie out of more than 23,000 votes cast. The tie was broken by pulling a name, placed in a film canister, out of a bowl. Republican David Yancey was declared the winner . The result was heightened by the fact that the win gave Republicans control of the state House by a single seat.

2016: A Vermont state Senate Democratic primary was determined by a single vote out of more than 7,400 cast.

2016: A Vermont state House seat was determined by one vote out of 2,000. Here's what's really crazy: This was a rematch, and when they first faced each other in 2010, the race was also decided by one vote — in the other direction.

2016: A New Mexico state House seat was decided by two votes out of almost 14,000.

2016: The margin on Election Day for a GOP primary for the U.S. House for the 5th Congressional seat from Arizona was just 16 votes, but it widened to 27 after a recount.

2016: A Wyoming state House GOP primary was decided by just one vote , 583 to 582.

2010: A state House race in Massachusetts ended in a tie, and the courts ordered a do-over. In the rerun, Republican Peter Durant wound up winning by just 56 votes out of about 8,000 cast.

2010: A state House race in Vermont was determined by one vote; another had a one-difference vote on Election Day, but was later widened to two).

2008: In the U.S. Senate race, Democrat Al Franken defeated Republican Norm Coleman by just 312 votes out of almost 2.9 million votes cast. Franken's win gave Democrats a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate .

2008: An Alaska state House race was won by four votes out of 10,000.

2006: A Democratic primary for an Alaska state House seat was decided by a coin toss to break a tie. The winner, Bryce Edgmon, is currently speaker of the Alaska House.

2004: A special election in Radford, Va., for commonwealth's attorney was decided by one vote .

2002: A tie for a county commissioner seat in Nevada was determined by drawing the highest card. Amazingly, both candidates drew a jack, but the Democrat drew a jack of spades, which beat out the Republican's jack of diamonds.

2002: A GOP state House primary in Washington state was determined by one vote out of more than 11,000 cast. The person who lost had to wonder what might have been when one of his fellow police officers confided that he forgot to mail in his ballot. "He left his ballot on his kitchen counter and it never got sent out," he said .

2002: A Connecticut state House seat was determined by one vote out of more than 6,400 cast.

1998: A Massachusetts state House GOP primary race ended in a tie after more than 1,700 ballots were cast. The winner was determined by a judge.

1996: South Dakota Democrat John McIntyre led Republican Hal Wick by just four votes out of almost 8,400 for a state legislative seat. A subsequent recount showed Wick the winner — by just one vote, 4,192 to 4,191. But the state Supreme Court ruled that one ballot for Wick was invalid because of an overvote, resulting in a tie . Wick eventually won, because the tie was broken by the state legislature, which went for Wick, 46-20.

1994 : A Wyoming state House seat ended in a 1,941-to-1,941 tie on Election Day. The tie was broken, live on NBC's Today show , with the secretary of state pulling a pingpong ball with the winning candidate's name on it out of the governor's hat. The winner went on to become speaker of the state House.

1991: A Virginia state House seat was determined by one vote out of almost 13,000 cast .

In the 19th century, there were even a few U.S. House races that were determined by a single vote:

1882: VA-1: Robert M. Mayo defeated Democrat George T. Garrison, 10,505 to 10,504.

1854: IL-7: Democrat James C. Allen beat Republican William B. Archer, 8,452 to 8,451.

1847: IN-6: Whig candidate George G. Dunn defeated Democratic candidate David M. Dobson, 7,455 to 7,454.

1847: VA-3: Whig Thomas S.Flournoy won 650 to 649

1829: KY-2: Jackson Democrat Nicholas Coleman defeated National Republican Adam Beatty, 2,520 to 2,519.

Of course, none of those is to mention the 537-vote margin that George W. Bush won Florida by in the 2000 presidential election — out of almost 6 million votes cast — or Donald Trump winning the presidency despite losing the popular vote by almost 3 million votes — all because he eked out just enough — 70,000 votes out of 12 million in three states — to win the Electoral College.

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The Singular Importance of Your Vote—And the Steps You Need To Take Before Election Day

"Some elections are razor-thin. In 2016, the margin of victory for Donald Trump in the swing states that he won was less than 1 percent," says Dr. Cobb. But it's not just the presidential election you need to think about every four years—between general elections, it's the midterms, it's all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, it's 100 seats in the Senate, it's 50 governorships, it's your mayor, it's ballot measures, and more, she adds. "Even if you're in a state where it's likely that one of the two major presidential candidates will win because it's a 'safe state,' there are other down-ballot races that are not necessarily safe. Your vote makes a huge difference."

• Lonna Atkeson, PhD , Lonna Atkeson, PhD, is a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Atkeson's general research program involves a wide number of subfields within political science including elections, campaigns, election administration, public opinion, political behavior, the media,...
• Rachael Cobb, PhD , chair and associate professor of government at Suffolk University

Simply put, voting is power, says Dr. Cobb. "The theory of democracy is that it is a government for and by the people, and the vote is the basic building block that gives people the power to control their government and to shape what policies they want and the future direction of their town, state, and country," she says, adding that your vote should serve as "the great equalizer." But that's not always the case.

There are many people for whom the right to vote is taken away. Discriminatory voter ID laws prevent millions of people from voting each year. Take for example a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that upheld a law requiring formerly incarcerated people to pay all fines and fees associated with their sentence before they're allowed to vote; it kept 1 million Floridians from voting .

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"Why would people spend so much time trying to take political power away from people?" asks Dr. Cobb. "Because political power actually matters. It makes a big difference in our lives, makes a big difference to the kind of economic power that we have to the distribution of government resources to communities. It makes a big difference to the kinds of policies that we're going to have in the future."

"Why would people spend so much time trying to take political power away from people?"

Lonna Atkeson, PhD , professor of political science at the University of New Mexico, explains that voting restrictions were brought over from Britain.

"[These laws] weren't initially discriminatory policies," says Dr. Atkeson. "When only white male property holders were allowed to vote, voting restrictions existed. After the Civil War, those same measures were used to deny African Americans the right to vote."

And these laws vary from state to state—in Vermont and Maine, for example, people in prison can vote . Dr. Atkeson explains that the ruling on Florida stems directly from a 2018 vote. Nearly two-thirds of voters in Florida chose to amend the state constitution and allow felons to vote. "What's the corrective measure? You create a new initiative and you put it on the ballot," says Dr. Atkeson. "The good thing is that democracy is an iterative process. And it's something that we're always building on and moving forward with."

Voting in the 2020 general election was especially tricky. Social distancing rules, paired with a high turnout of voters (as seen in the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 primary elections ), made poll lines much longer. Millions of people, some for the first time, voted by mail, and not every state was properly equipped to handle such volume of absentee ballots. Washington, Oregon, and Colorado, vote completely by mail, and Montana and Arizona have a permanent vote by mail lists that include 70 percent of the state population. But other states aren't as accustomed to the vote-by-mail process.

"States that haven't built the [vote-by-mail] system, their voter registration file is a lot dirtier, with many more errors in it," says Dr. Atkeson. Using inaccurate lists to mail out ballots means many ballots may never arrive at their intended destinations. And if you make a mistake on your ballot such as the wrong zip code or omitting an apartment number, it might not be counted. An NPR analysis found that within the 2020 primary elections held before July 2020 "at least 65,000 absentee or mail-in ballots were rejected because they arrived past the deadline, often through no fault of the voter."

To make sure your vote counts, Dr. Cobb explains that you have to do a bit more planning than usual. First step, look to your state's website for voting information and instructions for how to register to vote —and do it now.

"There are a lot of organizations that are I think trying to do really good work, and I'm delighted that they're all out there doing it. But at the end of the day, it is the state that is providing the reliable information about when voting is going to happen and who to contact, etc. And in most states, that's the Secretary of State's website," says Dr. Cobb. "Look early at what the overall plan is in your state: Is there early voting? If there is early voting, where it is going to be held? What is the process of mail ballots? What do you feel comfortable doing? And then really having a plan for how you're going to vote."

"Serving as a poll worker is one of the best things you can do this year to serve your country."

If you're mailing your ballot, send it in as early as possible. If your state has early in-person voting, Dr. Cobb says to take advantage of it in order to prevent long lines on election day, when it's expected that there will be a shortage of poll workers. "Anybody who's interested in getting involved, serving as a poll worker is one of the best things you can do this year to serve your country," she says.

The right to vote is precious. If you have it, you should use it.

"It can be quite disconcerting to have a barrage of negative news every single day and feel powerless," says Dr. Cobb. "But there's actually nothing like participating and actually doing something that is also one of the like healthy things you can do for yourself and for your community. Staying on the sidelines is disempowering; voting is always empowering."

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One Vote Can Make a Difference

Candidates and election officials can face challenges in persuading citizens that their vote matters. But the number of November 2014 contests that resulted in a tie or were decided by just one or two votes shows that, particularly in local races, every vote counts:

Pulling from a hat (or grocery bag)

• In Mount Dora, Florida, a tied City Council race was resolved when the challenger’s name was pulled from a hat .
• In Washington, two Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) races ended in a tie, the first ties in the city in at least 25 years. The races were resolved when an unbiased third party—a member of the city’s Commission on Human Rights— selected envelopes from a reusable grocery bag under the supervision of the director of elections. At least one other ANC race was decided by one vote.

Colored blocks

• A tied race in Cook County, Minnesota, was decided when the candidates chose colored blocks—one red, one blue—from a cloth bag; the candidate with the red block was declared the winner. Initially, the plan was to use Scrabble tiles, with “Z” designating the winner , but colored blocks won out.
• Also in Minnesota, the race for mayor of Curie came down to a coin flip .
• Two tied races in Lincoln County, Kentucky , were decided by coin tosses.
• Candidates in a tied race in Carneys Point Township, New Jersey, were given a choice of a coin toss or a special election and chose the special election.

All of the above

• In Neptune Beach, Florida, the tiebreaker for a City Council race was fairly elaborate : First, a judge drew names from a hat to determine which candidate would call a coin toss. Then, a second judge flipped a coin to determine the order in which the candidates would pull a numbered pingpong ball from a bag. And finally, the candidate with the higher numbered ball was declared the winner . It took six minutes and three games of chance.

Nobody voted

• A race in Hagerman, New Mexico, may be the ultimate example of “any vote would make a difference.” In the town school board election, three candidates ran unopposed; none received a vote , in part because the closest polling location was 26 miles away, in Roswell. Because none of the candidates was an incumbent, each needed at least one vote to win. The school board has since appointed all three candidates to the board.

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Essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy

Students are often asked to write an essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy

The essence of democracy.

Voting is the cornerstone of a democracy. It’s the tool that allows citizens to choose their leaders and voice their opinions on important issues.

Why Voting Matters

The power of each vote.

Every vote counts. In many cases, elections have been decided by just a few votes. Therefore, your vote can make a real difference.

In summary, voting is a crucial component of democracy. So, always exercise your right to vote!

250 Words Essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy

The role of voting.

Voting is not just a right, but a duty and a moral responsibility. It is the most direct and effective way of participating in the democratic process. The vote of every citizen contributes to the formation of a government and the trajectory of the nation.

Empowering the Masses

Voting gives citizens the power to express their opinion and choose leaders who align with their views. It is a tool to effect change and ensure the government reflects the will of the people. Voting also empowers marginalized groups, providing an equal platform for their voices to be heard.

Accountability and Transparency

Voting ensures accountability and transparency in the democratic system. It acts as a check on the government, reminding them of their responsibility towards the electorate. If the government fails to deliver, voters have the power to change the administration in the next election.

The importance of voting in democracy cannot be overstated. It is the fundamental right and duty of every citizen to participate in this process. It is through voting that we shape our society, influence policies, and ensure the government serves the common good. By voting, we uphold the democratic values of freedom, equality, and justice.

500 Words Essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy

Introduction.

Democracy is a system of governance where citizens participate directly or indirectly in the decision-making process. At the heart of this system lies the act of voting, an essential tool through which citizens express their will, choose their leaders, and influence public policy. The importance of voting in a democratic society cannot be overstated as it forms the basis for the exercise of political and civil rights.

The Pillar of Democratic Governance

Instrument for social change.

Voting is not only a political act but also a tool for social change. It gives citizens the power to influence public policy and the direction of societal evolution. Through the ballot box, citizens can express their views on critical issues such as education, health, economy, and social justice. Voting, therefore, serves as a peaceful means of effecting change and shaping the society we want to live in.

Equality and Inclusivity

In a democracy, voting underscores the principle of equality. Regardless of social, economic, or cultural backgrounds, every citizen has an equal vote. This inclusivity strengthens social cohesion and fosters a sense of belonging among citizens. Moreover, it ensures that marginalized and underrepresented groups have a voice in the political process, thereby promoting social equity.

Responsibility of Citizenship

Voting is not just a right; it is a responsibility. By participating in elections, citizens contribute to the democratic process and the overall health of the political system. Abstaining from voting leads to a skewed representation, which may not reflect the true will of the people. Therefore, every vote counts, and each citizen ought to take this responsibility seriously.

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Cover Story

Why do we vote ?

Voting is often inconvenient, time-consuming and may even seem pointless. Psychologists are exploring what drives us to the polls.

By Christopher Munsey

Monitor Staff

June 2008, Vol 39, No. 6

Print version: page 60

10 min read

Voting is personally costly. It takes time to register and to learn about the candidates' views. On election day, you may need to leave work, stand in long lines or slog through harsh weather, knowing all the while that the chances your individual vote will make a difference among the thousands, or millions cast, are pretty much zero.

"The probability that I'll be the deciding vote in the 2008 presidential election is much smaller then the chance that I'll get hit by a car on the way to the polls," says Florida Atlantic University's Kevin Lanning, PhD, paraphrasing an observation made by the late University of Minnesota psychologist Paul E. Meehl.

"If we look at it in those terms alone, it appears to be irrational," Lanning says.

So why do we bother?

Psychologists and political scientists have many theories. Some see voting as a form of altruism, or as a habitual behavior cued by yard signs and political ads. Others say voting may be a form of egocentrism, noting that some Americans appear to believe that because they are voting, people similar to them who favor the same candidate or party will probably vote, too, a psychological mechanism called the "voter's illusion."

Self-expression is likely to play a role as well, posits Lanning, who watches voting behavior as a poll worker in Palm Beach County, Fla. In a 2002 election, for example, he saw an ex-felon who repeatedly tried to vote. The man stood in line for an hour with his young children in tow and was turned away twice before voting officials verified that his voting rights had been restored.

"It mattered enough for him to go back and so the question is why?" Lanning says.

Looking back on the man's persistence, Lanning sees his determination to vote as an affirmative act that underscores his membership in the larger group, he says.

"We can think of voting as an expression of the self-concept," he says. "If I'm an American, and Americans vote, then the act of voting is an expression of who I am."

The social factors

Some research suggests that people are motivated to vote because they want to "fit in." Bruce Meglino, PhD, of the University of South Carolina's Moore School of Business, for example, sees voting as an example of a behavior included in social admonitions--things people are supposed to do--such as working hard when no one's watching or helping a stranger they'll never see again. Given that voting is an activity with more costs than benefits for the individual, Meglino thinks that highly rationally self-interested people probably don't bother to vote.

Research by Richard Jankowski, PhD, chair of the political science department at State University of New York, Fredonia, supports the role of altruism in voting. Looking back at questions posed in the American National Election Study's 1995 pilot study, Jankowski found that respondents who agreed with altruistic statements were more likely to have voted in 1994 elections.

"I found very strong evidence that people who vote tend to be highly altruistic, and people who don't vote tend to be much more self-interested," says Jankowski, who published his findings in Rationality and Society (Vol. 19, No. 1).

Altruism's role in voting is being further examined by James Fowler, PhD, a University of California, San Diego, political scientist who studies voting through the lens of the "dictator game." In the game, Player 1 is given a sum of money, and told that he or she can divide up the money with Player 2, or keep all of it for themselves. They're also told that Player 2 won't learn their identities. In theory, if people are solely motivated by self-interest, they will keep all the money. But only about a quarter of the players do that, the researchers found. About half share some of the money and nearly a quarter split it evenly with the unknown player, Fowler says.

Because altruists in the dictator game may be keen to engage in other prosocial behaviors, Fowler theorized that they would be more likely to vote than the people who keep all the money for themselves. A study in The Journal of Politics (Vol. 68, No. 3) supports that theory. A dictator-game player who split the money was twice as likely to vote when compared to a Scrooge.

Some people, of course, vote because they believe their vote will make a difference, according to a study published by Melissa Acevedo, PhD, of Westchester Community College, and Joachim Krueger, PhD, of Brown University, in Political Psychology (Vol. 25, No.1).

"Basically, people just think their vote makes a difference, and have this mistaken belief even though statistically it's not the case," Acevedo says.

In their study, they proposed two possible projections that people make before an election that make it more likely that they'll vote: They vote, and their candidate wins, or They abstain, and their candidate loses.

Building on an idea first proposed by the late Amos Tversky, PhD, and George Quattrone, PhD, in 1984, Acevedo and Krueger think that voters might be acting on two egocentric mechanisms: One, the "voter's illusion," projects their own behavior to people similar to themselves likely to support the same candidate; the other allows them a route to believe that their individual votes can affect the outcome by forecasting what might happen if they don't vote.

To test their ideas, Krueger and Acevedo asked participants to imagine they were supporters of the "Peace Party" in a fictional country where they faced a close election with the "War Party." They were asked to assume that they intended to vote, but that half the time circumstances prevented them from getting to the polls, and that they learned the results on the late-night news. They were then given four different scenarios: that their party had won and they voted (or abstained) and their party had lost and they had voted (or abstained).

For each scenario, participants rated how much regret they'd feel to having voted or abstained. The results showed low regret and high satisfaction for when they voted and their party won. When they voted and lost, or abstained and won, participants showed a greater expectancy of regret, less satisfaction and reduced confidence in voting again.

Acevedo and Krueger note that these psychological mechanisms can explain why some people vote strategically for a less preferred party or candidate, and the way voter turnout increases when polls predict a close race.

Those behaviors support the contention that people believe their votes can make a difference on electoral outcomes, Krueger says.

Meanwhile, there may be a genetic component to all of this: Following social rules and acting for others' welfare despite personal costs may be passed down genetically, according to new research by Fowler and Laura Baker, PhD, a psychologist studying the genetic and environmental foundations of behavior at the University of Southern California. In previous research, Baker had found that adopted children develop political leanings that are similar both to their adoptive parents and siblings, supporting the idea that where a person falls on the liberal to conservative spectrum is at least partially "culturally transmitted." Baker's research has also showed a strong familial component to conservative attitudes, as well as a genetic component. However, the degree of political participation via the act of voting may be a different story. In a study of more than 1,000 pairs of adult twins, Baker and Fowler found a stronger relationship in voter turnout in identical twins than in fraternal twins, with virtually no effect of shared family environment.

Party affiliation and religious affiliation does appear to be strongly influenced by shared environment between twins, however.

"The party you affiliate with seems culturally determined, but the degree to which you participate seems more genetically influenced," Baker says.

The findings of Fowler, Baker and co-author Christopher Dawes, a political science doctoral student, were scheduled to be published in the May issue of American Political Science Review .

Habits and norms

But voting may be just plain habit for some people, according to Wendy Wood, PhD, a social psychologist at Duke University and co-director of the Social Science Research Institute. She worked with political scientists John Aldrich and Jacob Montgomery at Duke examining American National Election Study survey data in 10 mid-term and presidential elections between 1958 and 2002. Her research suggests there are two kinds of voters: Election-specific voters, who are motivated by a particular candidate or issue, and habitual voters, who consistently show up to vote in every election. Habitual voters are much more likely to have lived at the same address over several elections and possess a "stable context" for voting. Voting by habit may be activated by such election cues as neighbors talking about politics or candidate signs posted in front yards, Wood says. (That's not to say they haven't carefully considered the issues: "You could show up habitually, but vote in a thoughtful way," Wood says.)

Less-habitual voters may vote due to social pressure, a significant factor in many people's decision to vote, according to Yale political scientist Donald Green, whose research shows the influence of one's peers: He conducted an experiment involving 180,000 Michigan households for the 2006 primary elections. About half of the group was the control group, and did not receive any mailed communication. The other half was divided into four groups, each targeted with a different mailing. People in the first group got a letter reminding them of the importance of doing their civic duty and voting. The second group received the same message, but they were also told that voting records were public records, and that their turnout was being studied. The third group got a letter listing whether or not they had voted in the last two elections, and were told that after the election, another letter would be sent to them indicating whether they voted in the upcoming election. The fourth group received a letter listing whether their neighbors had voted in the previous two elections, and told them that after the election, another letter would be sent out to them and their neighbors with a check mark next to their names indicating whether or not they had voted.

Among that fourth group, turnout rose by 8.1 percent in the primary, an effect Green described as "explosively large" compared with what's historically achieved in "get out the vote" mailings. Turnout rose by almost 4.9 percent in the group shown their own voting records and by 2.5 percent among the group told that their voting records were being studied, according to results published in the American Political Science Review (Vol. 102, No. 1).

Turnout in the control group was 29.7 percent, while turnout in the first group reminded of their civic duty to vote was 1.8 percentage points higher.

"Feeling obliged to comply with a social norm is indeed a powerful force," he says.

Such studies are important, notes Lanning, because they can give clues as to how to boost voter turnout among traditionally marginalized groups. If instead, people become convinced that elections aren't fair and that their participation doesn't matter, rule by the many can give way to the tyranny of the few, Lanning says.

"America is a great country, and we're great because people from so many different backgrounds can and do participate," he notes. "That greatness is at risk when significant groups, in significant numbers, don't participate as they could."

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Why Voting Matters?

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According to an  NPR article  , it’s not just presidential elections that can be affected by low voter turnout. Despite a  massive turnout  in the 2018 midterm election, voting in midterm races is traditionally low. The midterm elections in 2014, for example, saw the lowest voter participation in more than 70 years.

But a single vote can make a big difference. In fact, there have been more than a dozen races decided by a single vote or ending in a tie over the last 20 years.

Here’s a look back at some of those and some more of the closest races in U.S. history:

• 2018:  The Democratic primary for Baltimore County executive in July was decided by just  17 votes .
• 2017:  A Virginia House of Delegates race ended in a tie out of more than 23,000 votes cast. The tie was broken by pulling a name, placed in a film canister, out of a bowl. Republican David Yancey was  declared the winner . The result was heightened by the fact that the win gave Republicans control of the state House by a single seat.
• 2016:  A Vermont state Senate Democratic primary was  determined by a single vote  out of more than 7,400 cast.
• 2008:  In the U.S. Senate race, Democrat Al Franken defeated Republican Norm Coleman by just  312 votes  out of almost 2.9 million votes cast. Franken’s win  gave Democrats a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate .
• 2004:  A special election in Radford, Va ., for commonwealth’s attorney was decided by  one vote .
• 1994 : A Wyoming state House seat ended in a 1,941-to-1,941 tie on Election Day. The tie was broken,  live on NBC’s Today show , with the secretary of state pulling a pingpong ball with the winning candidate’s name on it out of the governor’s hat. The winner went on to become speaker of the state House.
• 1991:  A Virginia state House seat was determined by  one vote out of almost 13,000 cast .

In the 19th century, there were even a few U.S. House races that were determined by a single vote:

• 1882:  VA-1: Robert M. Mayo defeated Democrat George T. Garrison, 10,505 to 10,504 .
• 1854:  IL-7: Democrat James C. Allen beat Republican William B. Archer, 8,452 to 8,451.
• 1847:  IN-6: Whig candidate George G. Dunn defeated Democratic candidate David M. Dobson, 7,455 to 7,454.
• 1847:   VA-3: Whig Thomas S.Flournoy won 650 to 649
• 1829:  KY-2: Jackson Democrat Nicholas Coleman defeated National Republican Adam Beatty, 2,520 to 2,519.

Of course, none of those is to mention the 537 -vote margin that George W. Bush won Florida by in the 2000 presidential election — out of almost 6 million votes cast — or Donald Trump winning the presidency despite  losing the popular vote by almost 3 million votes  — all because he eked out just enough — 70,000 votes out of 12 million in three states — to win the Electoral College.

For more information about Why Every Vote Matters, please read the NPR article entitled “Why Every Vote Matters – The Elections Decided By A Single Vote (Or A Little More)” by Domenico Montanaro.

Why Does Your Vote Matter? John Dickerson gives the lowdown on why your vote matters in every election: from current and future policy, to state ballot questions, and more. 

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Learning by Voting: Students Want the Right to Make a Difference in Real Life

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This story about youth activism  was produced by  The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent  news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for  Hechinger’s newsletter .

OAKLAND, Calif. — Vida Mendoza is only 14, but she hopes to vote in two years.

Mendoza is a member of the student-led Oakland Youth Vote campaign, which advocates for giving 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote for school board representatives. In May, the Oakland City Council voted unanimously to put the initiative on the November ballot.

Mendoza, a freshman at Life Academy in Oakland, said her school board must be held accountable to the district’s 36,000 students, 85 percent of whom are people of color , and ensure that all of its schools are “getting the resources they need.”

“Who is the school board really representing?” said Mendoza. “Are students of color getting represented appropriately and are decisions being made to support them and their learning?”

In recent years, students have led climate marches, gun control rallies and walkouts protesting federal immigration policies and racial injustice. Now they are demanding a greater role in school policy and the decisions that shape their educations.

Some school districts, local governments and nonprofit groups across the country have galvanized this youth activism by giving students opportunities to participate in leadership roles and democracy in ways that go beyond civics classes and student government. They are also seeking to use this moment to educate teens about elections and voting and turn them into lifelong voters. Despite indications that youth are increasingly involved in civic life , voter turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds remains stubbornly low , and many young adults say they don’t know the basics of how to register to vote and cast a ballot.

Rebecca Kaplan, Oakland city council president and author of the measure to enfranchise 16- and 17-year-olds in school board elections, said it will have “both the immediate goal of letting young people have a say in the school board decisions that are so important for them, but also really a strategy to build our democracy and to build participation and civic involvement for the long haul.”

Andrew Brennen, a National Geographic education fellow working with youth-led movements, said efforts to empower students in school districts such as Oakland are refreshing, but nationwide, there’s a lot more work to be done.

“The reality is that in most school governance systems, young people are systematically marginalized,” he said, “and students play absolutely no role.”

Mendoza’s involvement in civic participation started in middle school, when she signed up for the All City Council Student Union, a student-led group sponsored by the Oakland school district that gives students a voice in school district decision-making. In that role, she visited schools around the city and was shocked by the disparities in school building facilities and resources, she said.

Every year the group chooses an issue to focus on. In recent years, the group’s advocacy has led to changes in the district’s graduation requirements, to align them with admissions requirements for California’s university systems, and an expansion of funding for an after-school meal program that had been cut by the school board.

The Oakland Youth Vote, listed on the November ballot as Measure QQ, is one of the latest causes the All City Council has taken up. For this effort, they have teamed with community organizations and the Oakland Youth Advisory Commission, a group convened by the city to consult on policy issues.

The idea to lower the voting age came about following the Oakland teachers’ strikes in February 2019, according to Lukas Brekke-Miesner, executive director of Oakland Kids First, one of the nonprofits involved in the campaign. Students had marched in solidarity with teachers but were upset when the school board slashed funding for several of their demands — for restorative justice programs and foster care case managers — during the contract renegotiations with the teachers’ union, he said. These cuts, coupled with students’ ongoing frustrations over successive reductions in critical services, helped inspire the All City Council and Oakland Kids First to join forces to launch the youth vote campaign in fall 2019 as a way to hold the school board accountable to young people in the district, Brekke-Miesner said.

Christian Castillo, a senior at Coliseum College Prep Academy, has been part of that effort, as a member of All City Council. He said he wasn’t interested in politics before joining the council this year. “Being politically to the right or left, or like having an opinion on it, sort of never really applied to me,” he said. “There was always other people to do it ... so I believed I didn't have to.” Now he’s lobbying his friends who are old enough to vote by informing them how they and their community would benefit if the Oakland Youth Vote passes.

Through All City Council, Oakland students have a louder voice in local education policy than students in many cities, but young people say it’s not enough. The council’s two student directors serve on the Oakland Board of Education in an advisory capacity and regularly meet with their adult counterparts. That’s an increasingly common model in both districts and states: Kentucky, for example, recently created its first student position on the state board of education. But even in districts and states that include student board representatives, students rarely have voting power.

Jessica Ramos, a senior at Skyline High School and a student director on the Oakland school board, she is treated as “just being a teenager” — asked to take on many adult responsibilities like working, paying taxes or taking care of family members, but denied any real power. “Things ... the government does affect us, but we can’t vote,” she said.

Oakland student directors are able to cast an advisory vote, reflected in the official record. But Ramos said “it doesn't really count. It's just an opinion.”

A handful of states, including California, Massachusetts, Tennessee and Vermont, do allow student representatives full voting rights on state boards of education. Massachusetts is unique in that the student board representatives are elected by their peers. Mendoza’s older sister, Gema Quetzal, served on the California board of education in 2018-19, enjoying the same voting power as other board members.

Now she’s a sophomore at Stanford University and is helping to do voter outreach for the Oakland Youth Vote. “As a voting member, I felt I could hold adults accountable for the decisions they made on the education of my peers across the state,” she said. “I also could give the perspective of what students see in their schools every day.”

Other school districts are also trying to elevate student voices in education policy and avoid “tokenism,” as Cristina Salgado puts it. She was hired as the student voice specialist at Chicago Public Schools in 2012 to oversee the district’s newly created “student voice committees.”

Students who serve on the committees learn how to research, organize and identify solutions to issues in their schools, said Salgado. The committees are different from traditional student government, she said, because any student can join. Committee members were among the students leading a walkout in the wake of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida; students on the committee are also focused on teaching their peers about organizing effectively and understanding the reasons for the protests. Chicago students have also helped shape school district discussions on school infrastructure, attendance and the hiring of a new high school principal.

The committees are housed within the Chicago school district's social science and civic engagement department, which promotes civic engagement in and out of the classroom through K-12 social studies curriculum, service learning and civics-focused project-based learning.

One of the department’s main goals is to educate students about democracy and the electoral process — and not only during an election year — said director Heather Van Benthuysen. “It’s not just about getting out the vote, it’s about talking about, learning about electoral issues, discussing and elevating issues in the community, engaging with elected officials and ensuring they represent you,” she said. “Teaching about civic engagement only once in a while is like teaching someone how to swim without ever putting them in the water.”

In early October, the district held a virtual event to train high school students from wards with particularly low voter turnout rates to do election outreach. Students learned about topics such as mail-in voting, local elections and how the pandemic could affect turnout. Later they analyzed voter turnout data in their neighborhoods and developed plans for educating younger peers, family members and neighbors about elections.

Brenda Casas, a 16-year-old junior at Tilden High School, in Chicago, said she’d started getting interested in politics after taking a civics class last year. But it wasn’t until the virtual workshop that she learned how to talk to others about the benefits of voting. After the event, she decided to broach the topic with her mother. “I was trying to convince her because she’s one of the people that doesn’t want to vote because they don’t trust the system,” Casas said.

Other districts and states have also started to promote hands-on civics education. In 2018, Massachusetts passed a bill that required districts to ensure every eighth grader participates in at least one student-led, nonpartisan civics project, and New York City Public schools hired its first “ student voice manager ” in 2019. This election cycle, many elections offices have teamed up with high schools to recruit students as poll workers. In Montgomery County, Maryland, 16- and 17-year olds can receive service learning hours as an election aide.

Meanwhile, Oakland isn’t the only city to attempt to lower the voting age for local elections. At least three cities in Maryland have extended voting rights in local elections to 16- and 17-year-olds, and a handful of states and other cities have explored the idea. In 2015, Generation Citizen, a nonprofit, launched a national campaign to extend voting rights to teens in local elections.

Berkeley voters passed a measure in 2016 that gave the city council authority to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote for school board members, but it stalled out amid financial and technical hurdles. The measure barred the city from spending any money on implementation, and since voting occurs at the county level, the logistics of a separate ballot for 16- and 17-year-olds in Berkeley has been complicated.

“So many of the obstacles that we've faced are just a result of the fact that Berkeley is one of the very first cities in the entire country to do this, and the only one in California, so there's no precedent for how to do this,” said Adrienne Mermin, a senior at Berkeley High School who has been pushing for implementation,

Proponents of Measure QQ, in Oakland, hope to avoid such red tape if the measure passes. The Oakland City Council is committed to funding and implementing the measure if it is approved, said Kaplan, Measure QQ’s author.

Mermin said if Oakland’s measure passes she expects it will put pressure on the city of Berkeley and surrounding Alameda County to lower the voting age. She said one reason 18- to 24-year-olds don’t vote is they are in the midst of big life transitions, such as entering college and the workforce. Casting a ballot in high school would familiarize students with the process at an earlier age and lead to higher turnout, Mermin said.

That’s held true in Takoma Park, a Maryland town of 18,000 near Washington, D.C. In 2012, it became the first U.S. city to lower the voting age to 16 for local elections. The turnout for 16- and 17-year-olds in local elections between 2013 and 2017 averaged roughly 42 percent, compared with 20 percent overall, according to data from the city clerk’s office.

“They basically behave like 70-year-olds,” said former city councilman Timothy Male. Teens ages 16 and 17 are also showing up at city council meetings, organizing candidate debates in Takoma Park and holding voter registration events, he said.

Back in Oakland, students have been working through the pandemic to ensure the ballot measure will succeed. In May, almost a dozen students called into a virtual Oakland City Council meeting to advocate for it. They have organized a phone- bank campaign and, in early October, hosted a virtual launch event on Facebook Live featuring student speakers and live performances by local artists and musicians.

Brekke-Miesner, of Oakland Kids First, said he has seen how being involved in policy making changes young people. Students who were once terrified of speaking before council members now command the room, he said. “They're so much more effective organizers than any of us as adults are, because they have way more on the line, and they know these issues in a really deep experiential way,” he said.

If Measure QQ gets the nod on November 3, it would enfranchise an estimated 8,000 16- and 17-year olds in Oakland.

Vida Mendoza, the Life Academy freshman, is looking forward to 2022 when she could be among those teen voters. Mendoza argues that it isn’t complacency that keeps young people from the polls, but the failure of schools to educate youth about the mechanics of voting and how they can make a difference.

Her passion for activism came from watching her mom and sister organize in the community, but she credits the All City Council with giving her a platform.

“You go to school to learn,” she said, “but you can also learn what is going on beyond your classroom.”

Monica Braine produced the audio segment for this story.

This story about  youth activism  was produced by  The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent  news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for  Hechinger’s newsletter .

This story has been supported by the Solutions Journalism Network , a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.

Odds That One Vote Can Make a Difference in an Election

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The odds that one vote can make a difference in an election are almost nil, worse than the odds of winning Powerball . But that doesn't mean it's impossible that one vote can make a difference. It's actually happened. There have been cases in which one vote decided an election.

Odds That One Vote Can Make a Difference

Economists Casey B. Mulligan and Charles G. Hunter concluded in a 2001 study that only one of every 100,000 votes cast in federal elections, and one of every 15,000 votes cast in state legislative elections “mattered in the sense that they were cast for a candidate that officially tied or won by one vote.”

Their study of 16,577 national elections from 1898 through 1992 found that one vote influenced the outcome of the 1910 election in New York’s 36th Congressional District. Democrat Charles B. Smith earned 20,685 votes, one more than Republican De Alva S. Alexander's total of 20,684.

Of those elections, however, the median margin of victory was 22 percentage points and 18,021 actual votes.

Mulligan and Hunter also analyzed 40,036 state legislative elections from 1968 through 1989 and found only seven that had been decided by a single vote. The median margin of victory was 25 percentage points and 3,256.5 actual votes in those elections.

In other words, based on this research, the chance that your vote will be the decisive or pivotal one in a national election is almost zilch. The same goes for state legislative elections.  

Chances That One Vote Can Make a Difference in a Presidential Race

Researchers Andrew Gelman, Gary King, and John Boscardin estimated the chances that a single vote would decide a U.S. presidential election to be 1 in 10 million at best and less than 1 in 100 million at worst.

Their work, "Estimating the Probability of Events That Have Never Occurred: When Is Your Vote Decisive?" appeared in 1998 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association . “Given the size of the electorate, an election where one vote is decisive (equivalent to a tie in your state and in the electoral college) will almost certainly never occur,” the trio wrote.  

Still, the odds of your one vote deciding a presidential election are still better than your odds of matching all six numbers of Powerball, which were smaller than 1 in 292 million.  

What Really Happens in Close Elections

So, what happens if an election really is decided by a single vote, or is at least pretty close? It’s taken out of the electorate’s hands.

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, who wrote "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything , " pointed out in a 2005 New York Times column that extremely close elections are often settled not at the ballot box but in courtrooms.  

Consider President George W. Bush ’s narrow victory in 2000 over Democrat Al Gore, which ended up being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court because of a recount in Florida.

“It is true that the outcome of that election came down to a handful of voters; but their names were Kennedy, O'Connor , Rehnquist, Scalia , and Thomas. And it was only the votes they cast while wearing their robes that mattered, not the ones they may have cast in their home precincts,” Dubner and Levitt wrote, referencing five Supreme Court justices.

When One Vote Really Did Make a Difference

Other races won by a single vote, according to Mulligan and Hunter:

• A 1982 state House election in Maine in which the victor won 1,387 votes to the loser’s 1,386 votes.
• A 1982 state Senate race in Massachusetts in which the victor won 5,352 votes to the loser’s 5,351; a subsequent recount later found a wider margin.
• A 1980 state House race in Utah in which the victor won 1,931 votes to the loser’s 1,930 votes.
• A 1978 state Senate race in North Dakota in which the victor won 2,459 votes to the loser’s 2,458 votes; a subsequent recount found the margin to be six votes.
• A 1970 state House race in Rhode Island in which the victor won 1,760 votes to the loser’s 1,759.
• A 1970 state House race in Missouri in which the victor won 4,819 votes to the loser’s 4,818 votes.
• A 1968 state House race in Wisconsin in which the victor won 6,522 votes to the loser’s 6,521 votes; a subsequent recount found the margin to be two votes.  

Mulligan, Casey B., and Charles G. Hunter. " The Empirical Frequency of a Pivotal Vote ." National Bureau of Economic Research, Nov. 2001.

Gelman, Andrew, et al. “ Estimating the Probability of Events That Have Never Occurred: When Is Your Vote Decisive ?”  Journal of the American Statistical Association , vol. 93, no. 441, Mar. 1988, pp. 1–9.

" Prizes and Odds ." Powerball.

Dubner, Stephen and Steven Levitt. " Why Vote? " The New York Times, 6 Nov 2005.

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• The Election of 1876: Hayes Lost Popular Vote but Won White House

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Essay: Vote and Make a Difference: Civic Engagement in US Elections

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Voting in our nation’s elections is an important part of our civic engagement as American citizens. “Nearly 56% of the U.S. voting-age population casts ballots in the 2016 presidential election” (DeSilver). With a sum only a smidge over fifty percent of American citizens capable of voting, we are failing our government system as a whole by not participating in our civic responsibilities. Voting in our nations, states, counties, and even communities fulfills our duties in our part of the governmental system. The majority of our nation’s decisions, and rule making is influenced by us, the American people, through the process of voting. With most Americans failing to do so, we are not following through with our civic responsibilities to voice our personal opinions, this, not using our rights given to us by our government.

As citizens of the United States of America, it is our job to participate in our civic responsibilities any way possible to benefit the country as a whole. With citizens being given many responsibilities such as obeying laws, paying taxes, and serving on the jury; voting trumps the following in the importance to our government. It is our role as citizens to participate in the action of voting. Whether you’re voting on your opinion for a presidential candidate, voting for your school board, or voting at a local town hall meeting; your one vote matters. One vote might not seem like much or  as if it does not matter but, your one vote makes a difference. It helps lead to the final outcome of what is being voted on. With voting, citizens are given the right to choose their nation’s, state’s, county’s, and community’s leaders. This helps determine the way those aspects are guided and shaped. The responsibility of voting gives us, as citizens, the opportunity of voicing ourselves in our nation's government.

Voting for our government’s representatives is a way the government lets it’s people have a voice. Through voting, our one vote can help determine who makes important decisions in their respective roles. The vote we cast in ballots voices our opinions in debates over political policies and law making in our nation. Voting for your political party voices your personal opinion on how you feel  about a certain topic or policy or  how you think the government should lead its people. Your vote does not mean that your beliefs and concerns will be put into action. It means the candidate you have voted for is voicing the same ideas as you, and you feel as if that candidate has the best opportunity to benefit the citizens the most. Voicing your opinion through voting is important by being able to let the government get a perspective of a citizens point of view from all social and financial backgrounds. The more citizens that vote for what they believe in and what they want to see done, the more influence they will have on the government system as a whole. Voicing your opinion through voting is a right most people disregard and take for granted. Most people do not realize the impact it has on our government's system.

The right to vote freely is a constitutional right given to us by the government. The right  has not always been granted to all Americans, only caucasian males were granted the right to vote. In 1870, the fifteenth amendment was passed giving the right to all males of any race to vote. Years later in 1920, the nineteenth amendment was passed that all women were given the right to vote. In today's present society, all american citizens no matter the race or gender, as long as they are eighteen and registered, are given the right to vote. Voting is looked at as more of a privilege given to us the people. Given that we live in a democratic government system, the people have the right to vote freely how they would like. This is not most cases for some countries as they are ruled by dictators or in a communist state of government. Americans should look at voting as a privilege given to us, considering not all citizens have always been given this right and the fact our nation gives us this right in general.

 Today's generation sees voting as somewhat useless and unimportant, but forgets the history behind this right given to us and the influence it has on our nation as a whole. Voting is beneficial in how our government runs by giving the citizens input.  As a whole, voting is an engagement that all American citizens should participate in as we are given this opportunity to share our voice and be heard by the government.

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Essay Papers Writing Online

The impact of community service – a deep dive into the power of giving back to society.

Community service essays serve as a powerful tool for individuals to reflect on their experiences, values, and impact on the world around them. Through the process of writing about their volunteer work, students are able to articulate the positive changes they have made in their communities and explore the lessons they have learned along the way.

Community service essays also play a crucial role in highlighting the importance of giving back to society and fostering a sense of empathy and compassion in individuals. By sharing personal stories of service, students can inspire others to get involved and make a difference in their own communities.

Moreover, community service essays can help students gain valuable skills such as critical thinking, communication, and problem-solving, as they reflect on the challenges and successes of their volunteer experiences. By documenting their service work, students can also showcase their commitment to social responsibility and community engagement to colleges, scholarship committees, and potential employers.

Why Community Service Essays Matter

In today’s society, the importance of community service essays cannot be overstated. These essays serve as a platform for individuals to showcase their dedication to helping others and making a positive impact on their communities. Through these essays, individuals can share their experiences, insights, and perspectives on the value of giving back to society.

Community service essays also play a crucial role in raising awareness about different social issues and encouraging others to get involved in volunteer work. By sharing personal stories and reflections, individuals can inspire and motivate others to take action and contribute to the betterment of society.

Furthermore, community service essays provide an opportunity for individuals to reflect on their own values, beliefs, and goals. Through the process of writing these essays, individuals can gain a deeper understanding of themselves and their place in the world, leading to personal growth and development.

In conclusion, community service essays matter because they have the power to inspire change, raise awareness, and promote personal growth. By sharing their stories and insights, individuals can make a difference in their communities and create a more compassionate and giving society.

The Impact of Community Service Essays

Community service essays have a profound impact on both the individuals writing them and the communities they serve. These essays serve as a platform for students to reflect on their experiences and articulate the lessons they have learned through their service work.

One of the primary impacts of community service essays is the opportunity for self-reflection. Students are encouraged to critically analyze their experiences, challenges, and accomplishments during their community service activities. This reflection helps students develop a deeper understanding of themselves, their values, and their role in the community.

Another significant impact of community service essays is the awareness they raise about social issues and community needs. By sharing their stories and insights, students can shed light on important issues and inspire others to get involved in community service. These essays can also help community organizations and stakeholders better understand the needs of their communities and how they can address them effectively.

Overall, community service essays play a vital role in promoting social responsibility, empathy, and civic engagement. They empower students to make a positive impact in their communities and contribute to creating a more compassionate and inclusive society.

Guidelines for Writing Community Service Essays

When writing a community service essay, it is important to follow certain guidelines to ensure that your message is clear and impactful. Here are some tips to help you craft a powerful and compelling essay:

• Start by brainstorming ideas and reflecting on your community service experiences.
• Clearly define the purpose of your essay and what you hope to convey to your readers.
• Organize your essay with a clear introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion.
• Use specific examples and anecdotes to support your points and showcase your personal growth.
• Highlight the impact of your community service activities on both yourself and others.
• Showcase your passion and dedication to serving your community.
• Be authentic and honest in your writing, and avoid exaggerating or embellishing your experiences.
• Edit and proofread your essay carefully to ensure clarity, coherence, and proper grammar.

Examples of Effective Community Service Essays

Community service essays can have a powerful impact on the reader when they are well-written and thoughtful. Here are a few examples to inspire you:

1. A Well-Structured Essay:

This essay begins with a compelling introduction that clearly articulates the author’s motivation for engaging in community service. The body paragraphs provide specific examples of the author’s experiences and the impact they had on both the community and themselves. The conclusion ties everything together, reflecting on the lessons learned and the importance of giving back.

2. Personal Reflection:

This essay delves deep into the author’s personal experiences during their community service work. It explores the challenges they faced, the emotions they encountered, and the growth they underwent. By sharing vulnerable moments and candid reflections, the author creates a connection with the reader and demonstrates the transformational power of service.

3. Future Goals and Impact:

This essay not only discusses past community service experiences but also looks toward the future. The author shares their aspirations for continued service and outlines how they plan to make a difference in the world. By showcasing a sense of purpose and vision, this essay inspires the reader to consider their own potential for impact.

These examples illustrate how community service essays can be effective tools for conveying meaningful stories, inspiring others, and showcasing personal growth. By crafting a compelling narrative and reflecting on the significance of service, you can create an essay that leaves a lasting impression.

How Community Service Essays Empower Individuals

Community service essays provide individuals with a platform to express their thoughts, share their experiences, and make a meaningful impact on society. By writing about their volunteer work and the lessons they have learned, individuals can empower themselves to create positive change and inspire others to do the same.

• Through community service essays, individuals can reflect on the importance of giving back to their communities and the value of helping those in need.
• These essays can serve as a source of motivation and inspiration for individuals to continue their philanthropic efforts and make a difference in the world.
• By sharing their stories through community service essays, individuals can raise awareness about social issues and promote greater empathy and understanding among their peers.

Overall, community service essays empower individuals to take action, advocate for change, and contribute to building a more compassionate and equitable society.

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Part 2: Can one person make a difference? What the evidence says.

By Benjamin Todd · Last updated May 2023 · First published April 2016

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On this page:

• 1 How much impact do doctors have?
• 2.1 The unknown Soviet Lieutenant Colonel who saved your life
• 3 What do these differences in impact mean for your career?
• 4 What does it mean to "make a difference"?
• 5 So how can you improve lives with your career?

It’s easy to feel like one person can’t make a difference. The world has so many big problems , and they often seem impossible to solve.

So when we started 80,000 Hours — with the aim of helping people do good with their careers — one of the first questions we asked was, “How much difference can one person really make?”

We learned that while many common ways to do good (such as becoming a doctor) have less impact than you might first think, others have allowed certain people to achieve an extraordinary impact.

In other words, one person can make a difference — but you might have to do something a little unconventional.

In this article, we start by estimating how much good you could do by becoming a doctor. Then, we share some stories of the highest-impact people in history, and consider what they mean for your career.

Reading time: 12 minutes

Table of Contents

• 4.1 Why did we choose this definition?
• 4.2 How can you measure social impact?
• 4.3 Is social impact all that matters?
• 6 Want to come back later?: Get the guide as a free book

How much impact do doctors have?

Many people who want to help others become doctors. One of our early readers, Dr Greg Lewis, did exactly that. “I want to study medicine because of a desire I have to help others,” he wrote on his university application, “and so the chance of spending a career doing something worthwhile I can’t resist.”

So, we wondered: how much difference does becoming a doctor really make? We teamed up with Greg to find out .

Since a doctor’s primary purpose is to improve health, we tried to figure out how much extra “health” one doctor actually adds to humanity. We found that, over the course of their career, an average doctor in the UK will enable their patients to live about an extra combined 100 years of healthy life, either by extending their lifespans or by improving their overall health. There is, of course, a huge amount of uncertainty in this figure, but the real figure is unlikely to be more than 10 times higher.

Using a standard conversion rate (used by the World Bank, among other institutions 1 ) of 30 extra years of healthy life to one “life saved,” 100 years of healthy life is equivalent to about three lives saved. This is clearly a significant impact; however, it’s less of an impact than many people expect doctors to have over their entire career.

There are three main reasons this impact is lower than you might expect:

• Researchers largely agree that medicine has only increased average life expectancy by a few years. Most gains in life expectancy over the last 100 years have instead occurred due to better nutrition, improved sanitation, increased wealth, and other factors.

Doctors are only one part of the medical system, which also relies on nurses and hospital staff, as well as overhead and equipment. The impact of medical interventions is shared between all of these elements.

Most importantly, there are already a lot of doctors in the developed world, so if you don’t become a doctor, someone else will be available to perform the most critical procedures. Additional doctors therefore only enable us to carry out procedures that deliver less significant and less certain results.

This last point is illustrated by the chart below, which compares the impact of doctors in different countries. The y-axis shows the amount of ill health in the population, measured in disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) per 100,000 people, where one DALY equals one year of life lost due to ill health. The x-axis shows the number of doctors per 100,000 people.

You can see that the curve goes nearly flat once you have more than 150 doctors per 100,000 people. After this point (which almost all developed countries meet), additional doctors only achieve a small impact on average.

So if you become a doctor in a rich country like the US or UK, you may well do more good than you would in many other jobs, and if you are an exceptional doctor, then you’ll have a bigger impact than these averages. But it probably won’t be a huge impact.

In fact, in the next article , we’ll show how almost any college graduate can do more to save lives than a typical doctor. And in the rest of the career guide, we’ll cover many other examples of common but ineffective attempts to do good.

These findings motivated Greg to switch from clinical medicine into biosecurity, for reasons we’ll explain over the rest of the guide.

Who were the highest-impact people in history?

Despite this uninspiring statistic about how many lives a doctor saves, some doctors have had much more impact than this. Let’s look at some examples of the highest-impact careers in history, and see what we might learn from them. First, let’s turn to medical research.

By 1968, it had been shown that a solution of glucose and salt, administered via feeding tube or intravenous drip, could prevent death due to cholera. But millions of people were still dying every year from the disease. While working in a refugee camp on the border of Bangladesh and Burma, Dr David Nalin sought to turn this insight into a therapy that could be used in poor rural areas. He showed in a study that simply drinking a solution made at the right concentration and consumed at the right rate could be almost as effective as delivery via feeding tube or IV.

This meant the treatment could be delivered with no equipment, and using extremely cheap and widely available ingredients.

Since then, this astonishingly simple treatment has been used all over the world, and the annual rate of child deaths from diarrhoea has plummeted from around 5 million to 1.5 million. 2 Researchers estimate that the therapy has saved over 50 million lives to date, mostly children’s. 3

If Dr Nalin had not been around, someone else would, no doubt, have discovered this treatment eventually. However, even if we imagine that he sped up the roll-out of the treatment by only five months, his work alone would have saved about 500,000 lives. This is a very approximate estimate, but it makes his impact more than 100,000 times greater than that of an ordinary doctor:

But even just within medical research, Dr Nalin is far from the most extreme example of a high-impact career. For example, one estimate puts Karl Landsteiner’s discovery of blood groups as saving tens of millions of lives by enabling transfusions. 4

Beyond the medical field, later in the guide we’ll cover the stories of a hugely impactful mathematician, Alan Turing, and bureaucrat, Viktor Zhdanov.

Or, let’s think even more broadly. Roger Bacon and Galileo pioneered the scientific method — without which none of the discoveries we covered above would have been possible, along with other major technological breakthroughs like the Industrial Revolution. These individuals were able to do vastly more good than even outstanding medical practitioners.

The unknown Soviet Lieutenant Colonel who saved your life

Or consider the story of Stanislav Petrov, a Lieutenant Colonel in the Soviet Army during the Cold War. In 1983, Petrov was on duty in a Soviet missile base when early warning systems apparently detected an incoming missile strike from the United States. Protocol dictated that the Soviets order a return strike.

But Petrov didn’t push the button. He reasoned that the number of missiles was too small to warrant a counterattack, thereby disobeying protocol.

If he had ordered a strike, there’s at least a reasonable chance hundreds of millions would have died. The two countries may have even ended up engaged in an all-out nuclear war, leading to billions of deaths and, potentially, the end of civilisation. If we’re being conservative, we might quantify his impact by saying he saved a billion lives. But that’s almost certainly an underestimate, because a nuclear war would also have devastated scientific, artistic, economic, and all other forms of progress, leading to a huge loss of life and wellbeing over the long run.

Later in the guide we’ll discuss why we think these long-run effects could be vastly more important than “just” saving a billion lives from nuclear catastrophe.

Yet even with the lower estimate, Petrov’s impact likely dwarfs that of Nalin and Landsteiner.

What do these differences in impact mean for your career?

We’ve seen that some careers have had huge positive effects, and some have vastly more than others.

Some component of this is due to luck — the people mentioned above were in the right place at the right time, giving them the opportunity to have an impact that they might not have otherwise received. You can’t guarantee you’ll make an important medical discovery.

But it wasn’t all luck: Landsteiner and Nalin chose to use their medical knowledge to solve some of the most harmful health problems of their day, and it was foreseeable that someone high up in the Soviet military might have the opportunity to have a large impact by preventing conflict during the Cold War.

So, what does this mean for you?

People often wonder how they can “make a difference,” but if some careers can result in thousands of times more impact than others, this isn’t the right question. Two different career options can both “make a difference,” but one could be dramatically better than the other.

Instead, the key question is: What are some of the best ways to make a difference? In other words, what can you do to give yourself a chance of having one of the highest-impact careers? Because the highest-impact careers achieve so much, a small increase in your chances means a great deal.

The examples above also show that the highest-impact paths might not be the most obvious ones. Being an officer in the Soviet military doesn’t sound like the best career for a would-be altruist, but Petrov probably did more good than our most celebrated leaders, not to mention our most talented doctors. Having a big impact might require doing something a little unconventional.

So how much impact can you have if you try, while still doing something personally rewarding? It’s not easy to have a big impact, but there’s a lot you can do to increase your chances. That’s what we’ll cover in the next couple of articles .

But first, let’s clarify what we mean by “making a difference.” We’ve been talking about lives saved so far, but that’s not the only way to do good in the world.

What does it mean to “make a difference”?

Everyone talks about “making a difference” or “changing the world” or “doing good,” but few ever define what they mean.

So here’s a definition. Your social impact is given by:

The number of people 5 whose lives you improve, and how much you improve them, over the long term. 6

This means you can increase your social impact in three ways:

• By helping more people.
• By helping the same number of people to a greater extent (pictured below).
• By doing something which has benefits that last for a longer time.

We think the last option is especially important, because many of our actions affect future generations . For example, if you improve the quality of government decision-making, you might not see many quantifiable short-term results, but you will have solved lots of other problems over the long term.

Why did we choose this definition?

We have a separate article about our definition , but here are some brief points:

Many people disagree about what it means to make the world a better place. But most agree that it’s good if people have happier, more fulfilled lives, in which they reach their potential. So, our definition is narrow enough that it captures this idea.

Moreover, as we’ll show, some careers do far more to improve lives than others, so it captures a really important difference between options. If some paths can do good equivalent to saving hundreds of lives, while others have little impact at all, that’s an important difference.

But the definition is also broad enough to cover many different ways to make the world a better place. It’s even broad enough to cover environmental protection, since if we let the environment degrade, the future of civilisation might be threatened. In that way, protecting the environment improves lives.

Importantly, having a broad scope also allows us to include nonhuman animals, as well as potential future sentient beings that might be entirely digital — which is why we have profiles on factory farming , wild animal welfare , and artificial sentience .

That said, the definition doesn’t include everything that might matter. You might think the environment deserves protection even if it doesn’t make people better off. Similarly, you might value things like justice and aesthetic beauty for their own sakes.

In practice, our readers value many different things. Our approach is to focus on how to improve lives, and then let people independently take account of what else they value. To make this easier, we try to highlight the main value judgements behind our work. It turns out there’s a lot we can say about how to do good in general, despite all these differences.

How can you measure social impact?

We are always uncertain about how much impact different actions will have — but that’s OK, because we can use probabilities to make comparisons. For instance, a 90% chance of helping 100 people is roughly equivalent to a 100% chance of helping 90 people. Though we’re uncertain, we can quantify our uncertainty and make progress .

Moreover, even in the face of uncertainty, we can use rules of thumb to compare different courses of action. For instance, later in this career guide we argue that, all else equal, it’s higher impact to work on neglected areas. So, even if we can’t precisely measure social impact, we can still be strategic by picking neglected areas. We’ll cover many more rules of thumb for increasing your impact in the upcoming articles.

Is social impact all that matters?

We don’t know the ultimate truths of moral philosophy, but in the real world we think it’s really important not to only focus on impact.

In particular, it’s normally better — even from the perspective of social impact — to always act with good character, respect the rights and values of others, and to pay attention to your other personal values.

We don’t endorse doing something that seems very wrong from a common-sense perspective, even if it seems like it might let you have a greater impact.

Read more about our definition of social impact .

So how can you improve lives with your career?

In the next article, we’ll cover how any college graduate can make a big impact in any job. After that we’ll cover how to choose a job in which you can fulfil your potential for impact.

Read next: Part 3: No matter your job, here’s 3 evidence-based ways anyone can have a real impact

Continue →

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Notes and references

• Source: World Bank , p. 402, retrieved 31-March-2016 ↩
• Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Global Burden of Disease Study 2019, 2019. https://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-results/ ↩

Since the adoption of this inexpensive and easily applied intervention, the worldwide mortality rate for children with acute infectious diarrhoea has plummeted from around 5 million to about 1.5 million deaths per year. Lives Saved: Over 57,500,000.

Source: Science Heroes. Archived link , retrieved 4-December-2022.

Very roughly, this means 50/40 = 1.25 million lives have been saved per year. So if Dr Nalin sped up the discovery by five months (just a guess), that means that (5/12)*1.25 = 0.52 million extra lives were saved by his actions. This is a highly approximate estimate and could easily be off by an order of magnitude. See more comments in the next footnote. ↩

Superman of Science Makes Landmark Discovery – Over 1 Billion Lives Saved So Far Every source quoted an amazing number of transfusions and potential lives saved in countries and regions worldwide. High impact years began around 1955 and calculations are loosely based on 1 life saved per 2.7 units of blood transfused. In the USA alone an estimated 4.5 million lives are saved each year. From these data I determined that 1.5% of the population was saved annually by blood transfusions and I applied this percentage on population data from 1950-2008 for North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Asia and Africa. This rate may inflate the effectiveness of transfusions in the early decades but excludes the developing world entirely.

Source: Science Heroes. Archived link , retrieved 4-March-2016.

If we assume a constant number of lives saved per year, then that’s about 10 million lives per year. If he sped up the discovery by two years, then that’s 20 million lives saved.

This is a highly approximate estimate and could easily be off by an order of magnitude in either direction, and seem more likely to be too high than too low. We’re a bit sceptical of the Science Heroes figures. Moreover, our attempt at modelling the speed-up is very simple. Since most of the lives were saved in the modern era once a large number of people had medical care, it’s possible that speeding up the discovery wouldn’t have had much impact at all. On the other hand, the discovery of blood groups probably made other scientific advances possible, and we’re ignoring their impact. Nevertheless, the basic point stands: Landsteiner’s impact was likely vastly greater than a typical doctor. ↩

• We often say “helping people” here for simplicity and brevity, but we don’t mean just humans — we mean anyone with experience that matters morally — e.g. nonhuman animals that can suffer or feel happiness, or even conscious machines if they ever exist. ↩

The more rigorous working definition of social impact used by 80,000 Hours is:

“Social impact” or “making a difference” is (tentatively) about promoting total expected wellbeing — considered impartially, over the long term — without sacrificing anything that might be of comparable moral importance.

You can read about why we use this definition in our article on defining social impact . ↩

More From Forbes

College essays that worked and how yours can too.

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CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS - JULY 08: A view of Harvard Yard on the campus of Harvard University on ... [+] July 08, 2020 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have sued the Trump administration for its decision to strip international college students of their visas if all of their courses are held online. (Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)

The college essay is a pivotal piece of the college application showcasing your individuality and differentiated outlook to admissions officers. What makes an essay truly shine? Let’s dive into the words behind three standout essays highlighted by university websites and a school newspaper's brand studio so you can get into the right mindset for crafting your own narrative.

Embracing Differences: Finding Strength In Uniqueness

Essay Excerpt: ‘Bra Shopping ’ (Harvard)

Featured by the Harvard Crimson Brand Studio , Orlee's essay recounts a student's humorous and insightful experience of bra shopping with her grandmother, weaving in her unique family dynamics and challenges at her prestigious school.

What Works:

• Humor and Honesty: The student's humor makes the essay enjoyable to read, while her honesty about her challenges adds depth.
• Self-Awareness: She demonstrates a strong sense of self-awareness, embracing her uniqueness rather than trying to fit in.
• Resilience: Her narrative highlights resilience and the ability to find strength in differences.

For Your Essay : To write an essay that embraces your uniqueness, start by identifying a quirky or challenging experience that reflects who a key insight into your experience. Think about how this experience has shaped your perspective and character. Use humor and honesty to bring your story to life, and focus on how you have embraced your differences to become stronger and more resilient.

Best High-Yield Savings Accounts Of 2024

Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024, finding connections: humor and self-reflection.

Essay: ‘Brood X Cicadas ’ (Hamilton College)

As an example on Hamilton's admissions website, Nicholas writes about the cicadas swarming his hometown every 17 years and draws a parallel between their emergence and his own transition to college life. He uses humor and self-reflection to create a relatable and engaging narrative.

• Humor: Nicholas uses humor to make his essay entertaining and memorable. His witty comparisons between himself and cicadas add a unique twist.
• Self-Reflection: By comparing his life to the cicadas’, he reflects on his own growth and readiness for change.
• Relatability: His narrative about facing new experiences and challenges resonates with readers who have undergone similar transitions.

For Your Essay: To infuse humor and self-reflection into your essay, start by identifying an ordinary experience or object and think about how it relates to your life. Write down funny or insightful observations about this connection. Use humor to make your essay more engaging, but ensure it still conveys meaningful self-reflection. This balance can make your essay both entertaining and profound.

Persistence and Multicultural Identity: Life Lessons From Tortilla Making

Essay: ‘ Facing The Hot Griddle ’ (Johns Hopkins University)

In this essay published by Hopkins Insider, Rocio uses the process of making tortillas to explore her multicultural identity and the challenges she has faced. Her story beautifully weaves together her Guatemalan heritage and her experiences growing up in the United States.

• Metaphor and Symbolism: The process of making tortillas becomes a powerful metaphor for the student’s journey and struggles. The symbolism of the masa harina and water mixing parallels her blending of cultural identities.
• Personal Growth: The essay highlights her perseverance and adaptability, qualities that are crucial for success in college.
• Cultural Insight: She provides a rich, personal insight into her multicultural background, making her story unique and compelling.

For Your Essay: To write an essay that explores your identity through a metaphor, start by thinking about an activity or tradition that holds significant meaning for you. Consider how this activity relates to your life experiences and personal growth. Use detailed descriptions to bring the activity to life and draw connections between the process and your own journey. Reflect on the lessons you've learned and how they've shaped your identity.

A winning college essay isn’t simply about parading your best accomplishment or dramatizing your challenges. It’s not a contest for which student is the most original or entertaining. Rather, the essay is a chance for you to showcase your authenticity, passion, resilience, social awareness, and intellectual vitality . By sharing genuine stories and insights, you can create an essay that resonates with admissions committees and highlights your unique qualities.

For you to have the best possible essay, mindset is key. Here’s how to get into the zone:

• Reflect Deeply: Spend time thinking about your experiences, challenges, and passions. Journaling can help you uncover deep insights.
• Discuss and Share: Talking about your stories with friends, family, or mentors can provide new perspectives and emotional clarity.
• Immerse Yourself: Engage in activities that you are passionate about to reignite the feelings and memories associated with them.
• Draft Freely: Don’t worry about perfection on the first try. Write freely and honestly, then refine your narrative.

The secret to a standout college essay lies in its authenticity, depth, and emotional resonance. By learning from these successful examples and getting into the right mindset, you can craft an essay that not only stands out but also provides a meaningful insight into who you are. Remember, your essay is your story—make it a piece of writing that you will always be proud of.

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Exploring how religious and secular forces interact in the modern world.

Global Currents article

The (national) fantasies of hope: rethinking the 2024 indian elections.

In early June 2024, India completed its general elections, which resulted in a third consecutive victory for the incumbent Hindu nationalist Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) margin of victory, however, was substantially lower than expected and the party failed to win a parliamentary majority in the Lok Sabha, or lower house of parliament. The change in the margin of victory marks the return of coalition politics, as Modi must now rely on allied parties to form the new government under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which includes numerous center and right-wing parties. Conversely, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), led by the primary opposition party, the Indian National Congress (INC), stunned many observers as it secured a greater number of seats than expected. The demise of the INC and its leader Rahul Gandhi, the great-grandson of India’s inaugural prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, appeared to have been greatly exaggerated.

These election results produced a sense of jubilation amongst Indians who are against the politics of the Modi government. On social media and in news stories, people celebrated that Modi was “cut to size,” but more significantly, that Indians had reclaimed their “democracy” in spite of significant electoral malpractice. Within days, a plethora of analyses from Indian academics in particular circulated and proclaimed that something had fundamentally changed in India. Some argued that this election was a return to “a disinterested vision of the good society” over one that was a “politics of self-interest,” while others spoke of how “the pall of suffocation created by a decade of Modi’s strongman style…has lifted” and that this election “affirmed pluralism over populism.” The election, thus, was viewed as a “vote against hate.” Perhaps the title that succinctly summarized most reactions was that the elections brought “hope, even in defeat.” Therefore, even though the BJP retained power, the failure to reach its dominant majority in the 543-member Lok Sabha— ‘ab ki baar char sau paar’ [This time with over 400 seats] as Modi’s campaign slogan went—signaled hope for Indian democracy as it was presumed that the relationship between state and society could undergo repair as the latter could renew the state.

The National Symbolic

In-depth electoral analysis and judgments of the recent Indian elections abound. Yet, is it possible to read these initial moments of hope as indicative of an Indian “National Symbolic”—what Lauren Berlant has defined as some “tangled cluster” of “the juridical, territorial ( jus soli ), genetic ( jus sanguinis ), linguistic, or experiential” that transforms individuals into national subjects? (5) The National Symbolic produces fantasy and, in particular, “a fantasy of national integration, although the content of this fantasy is a matter of cultural debate and historical transformation” (22). How do the celebratory, and indeed, jubilatory, declarations in response to the recent elections demonstrate an ongoing desire for an integrated Indian form? And how might that national fantasy affirm, rather than repudiate, Modi and his politics? We contend the celebration of Indian political forms—citizenship and the constitution, for example—reveals the perpetuation of an Indian national fantasy while it disavows the violent divisions that produce the very space of the nation. [1] Put differently, hope reaffirms the life and the narrative of the nation—signing and countersigning an Indian history, both a singular and plural one. Our goal, in contrast, is not to provide a more inclusive understanding of the Indian national fantasy, but to consider the theoretical underpinnings of the post-election relief that continue to make India a particularly powerful object of desire.

If this celebration, this hope, is tethered to an Indian national fantasy, what is this fantasy with all its multiple and contradictory meanings? For most liberal-left Indians, Modi’s tenure as prime minister since 2014 violates India’s foundation as a tolerant, multicultural nation that—while not perfect—strives towards a democratic and secular form. This tolerant form of India gains its coherence against the religious fundamentalist or the orthodox, which is known, notoriously in the historiography of South Asia, as the semiticization of Indian traditions—in which the introduction of proselytization and the assertion of religious difference during the colonial period created a “semitic” form against a tolerant “Indic” one . Numerous scholars have demonstrated that this racist framing accrues numerous adherents across the political spectrum. Sustained by historical analyses that privilege the fluid and multiple, national fantasies around India are thus bound to tolerance. It is a tolerance that functions in concert with “the will of an interventionist modernizing state in order to…supply, in the name of ‘national culture,’ a homogenized content to the notion of citizenship” as Partha Chatterjee writes—an integrated, whole, and unassailable national body.

The Role of the Indian Constitution

The Indian constitution plays a significant role in this national fantasy, and it certainly was invoked a number of times during the 2024 election. Rahul Gandhi appeared in a press conference with the constitution in hand; reports later commented on how sales of the constitution have skyrocketed since. After his victory, Modi, too, called the constitution a “ guiding light. ”

One reason for the Indian constitution’s critical role in national fantasy, especially on the liberal-left, is because of Indian federalism: the distribution of powers between the national government and the different states’ governments creates a political form that allows for the possibility of tolerance and inclusion for diverse peoples. To take one example, in his theorization, Partha Chatterjee contends that the federalism enshrined in the Indian constitution coupled with the unique character of Indian citizenship does not allow for nation-people-state to be collapsed together to create a whole integrated national fantasy. There can be no singular National Symbolic, although the BJP constitutes an attempt to create one. Instead, in India, Chatterjee contends we find remarkably diverse political communities that are “peoples-nation”—political communities not integrated into the nation-state, but in tense relation to the nation-state. This separation provides an opportunity for a redemptive politics that is tolerant of numerous narratives and peoples. For Chatterjee, this is the case because of the structure of India’s postcolonial democracy in which formal citizenship was granted to all before their inclusion in civil society, creating, what Chatterjee calls, an alternative political society. In short, the bourgeoisie are dominant, but not hegemonic.

The BJP’s ability to triangulate nation-state-people into a unified national fantasy, then, is countered by federalism and political societies, such as regional populist parties. But beyond these regional parties, Chatterjee argues that what is needed is a counter-narrative to Hindu nationalism’s claims to cultural homogeneity to bind regional mobilizations together in the center, “a vibrant federal republic.” Such a narrative would realign the relation between peoples-nation and nation-state by making it plural with “several civilizational narratives” (109).

In a strange twist, the very impossibility of unified India—the lack of hegemony—becomes a celebrated feature of India , integrated into the nation itself, rather than calling India into question. In their very impossibility, India’s constitution and democratic culture become redemptive, always already tolerant and inclusive. Chatterjee, therefore, reinscribes the very national fantasy he purports to critique by appropriating the fundamental deadlock in the national fantasy by making it plural and offering a more inclusive and hopeful narrative for India.

Following Chatterjee’s analysis, it is easy to see why the return of coalition politics was celebrated in the aftermath of the election. Coalition politics signals the possibility for coalescing a counter-narrative of peoples-nation and, therefore, a renewed sense of hope that functions within the Indian National Symbolic, no matter India’s sordid history. As Shruti Kapila stated , there was “new-found excitement at the return to old-style political jockeying.” The return of the old India thus becomes the promise of the new India. For Chatterjee , too, “It is time to restore [coalition politics] to its proper place at the centre of our political life.” Restoration and return signal hope for a better India to come—one that was always there.

Chatterjee, therefore, reinscribes the very national fantasy he purports to critique by appropriating the fundamental deadlock in the national fantasy by making it plural and offering a more inclusive and hopeful narrative for India.

Against this hopeful excitement that creates a theoretical distinction between people and state, one must ask: Why focus on “India” at all, especially when there are political movements that reject the idea of India and the fantasies it generates? Why, then, do academics continue to provide unifying narratives for India, reinscribing the aims of a nation-state? At what point do we have to rethink the constant attempt to narrate the history of the Indian nation-state-people(s)? Do we need only more robust histories of the diversity and tolerance of India and its constitution? Or do we have to question the very logic of history since the national imaginary cannot be reduced to historical content—plural or otherwise–but is, instead, history itself ? These are especially important questions since, as Rahul Rao writes, “Calls to protect the Constitution cannot mean much to those who do not wish to be governed by it – unless the Constitution can contemplate a process by which it will no longer be applicable to unwilling subjects.”

Recall that this is a constitution that has entrenched India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir and cemented the second-class citizenship status of Muslims in India. In an article written before he was arrested, the Muslim activist who was involved with the anti-CAA and anti-NRC protests in India, Sharjeel Imam, writes of how the “dismal figures among Muslims in relation to poverty, education, employment and political representation clearly demonstrate the lack of foresight regarding the minority issue during the constitution-making process.” He says that this occurred because of the articulation of the country as Bharat (a geographic imaginary derived from Sanskrit texts), which “reflects an exclusively Hindu imagination of Indian history” as well as the lack of safeguards for Muslims in terms of representation, cow protection, and finally, the definition of “schedule castes,” which excluded Muslims and led them to “further impoverishment, as they are hardly supported by any relevant programs for affirmative action at the central state level.” The very foundational moment of India then is premised on exclusion and the binding together of people-nation-state, even if scholars try to imagine otherwise. This binding reveals that the very distinction between the “state” and “political society” that makes it possible to locate hope in the latter is difficult to sustain.

Communalism and Coalition Politics

Another recurrent theme amid the celebrations was that the election revealed the limits of communal politics—a politics embodied by Modi and the BJP. During Modi’s re-election campaign, he repeatedly made a number of remarks against Muslims in India, accusing them of being “infiltrators” that depleted resources available to Hindus in order to galvanize his Hindu base. Against this Hindu-nationalist ideology, the return to coalition politics came to be seen as a return to an earlier and more tolerant secularism.

A wider historical view reveals anti-Muslim or minority hate or policies in India are not the sole property of the BJP; such exclusion has defined Indian politics since 1947. The Congress Party has engaged in communalism, and served as a source of violence or domination for minorities, including Muslims, Dalits, and Sikhs, or the occupied in Kashmir. During the election, the Indian National Congress did not directly address the Muslim question in India. In the press conference after election results came out, Rahul Gandhi thanked “the poor and marginalised people who came out to save the constitution. Workers, farmers, Dalits, adivasis [Indigenous] and backwards have helped save this constitution.” It was not lost on Muslims that they were not mentioned, despite the country’s 200 million Muslims coming out in droves to vote for the INDIA alliance, led by the Congress Party. The situation in India is such that an opposition party, ostensibly a party that is against the BJP, cannot even mention Muslims or address their fears and concerns, knowing that it will isolate India’s predominantly Hindu population.

A wider historical view reveals anti-Muslim or minority hate or policies in India are not the sole property of the BJP; such exclusion has defined Indian politics since 1947.

Anthropologist Irfan Ahmad told Al Jazeera English , “Since 2014, this electoral circus has passionately been staging Muslims as a threat against which people are asked to vote. While the BJP issues the threat openly, the non-BJP parties do implicitly: That is by remaining silent. No party has the courage to talk about the violence done to the Muslims.” Sikhs, too, have been violently targeted. Yet this violence was met with silence in the election across India even with the continued criminalization of dissent , arbitrary detentions of foreign nationals , as well as state-orchestrated murder abroad .

Yet a politics of hope that centers an Indian national fantasy means that amidst the flurry of pieces in the wake of the elections, no demands were made of the Congress party or the INDIA alliance to take stock of its communal past and present. Instead, the past and future of India always redeems the violent exclusions in the present. We must ask: If hope remains tethered to an Indian future, is the current iteration of anti-Hindutva politics rooted in a concern for the oppressed and the excluded? If so, how does such a politics contend with the Indian National Congress and India’s “secular” or “liberal” political formations without further entrenching an Indian national fantasy? To be sure, many privileged, upper caste liberal Indians have been embarrassed by the authoritarianism and Hindu nationalism of the prime minister who has harmed the national fantasy of a “democratic India.” The hope that stems from the election is particularly powerful and seductive for them since it keeps alive the “ Incredible India” brand as it provides a route to self-correction: India can return to its original promise, improvements can once again be made.

Against hope, then, it might be time to interrogate these fantasies. If citizenship is marked by exclusions and colonial inclusions (Kashmir, Sikhs, and others), rather than formal granting and the creation of political societies, then India’s impossibility cannot be redeemed in coalition politics or counter-narratives. If violent exclusion and then forceful integration is at the center of India, why does it and its constitution remain the desirous object of history? How can one detach oneself from a hope and world that is not working? To detach oneself is not to escape fantasy altogether. To undo the world while making another, Berlant writes, “requires fantasy to motor programs of action, to distort the present on behalf of what the present can become” (263). But the fantasies generated by the Indian National Symbolic serve to install a singular vision of politics by seamlessly binding together the present with past and future in the promise of tolerance that always eludes.

[1] We draw here from Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship and Manu Goswami, Producing India From Colonial Economy to National Space .

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